A Defence Of History And Class Consciousness
adefence of history and class consciousnesstailism and the dialecticGEORGLUKACS
A Defence ofHistory and Class ConsciousnessY
A Defence ofHistory and Class ConsciousnessTailism and the Dialectic GEORG.LUKACSTranslated by Esther LeslieWith an introduction byJohn Reesand a postface by Slavoj Zi.ZekYVERSOLondon New York
This edition frrst published by Verso 2000 Verso 2000Translation Esther Leslie 2000Introduction John Rees 2000Postface Slavoj tizek 2000First published asChvostismus und Dialektik, by Aron Verlag, Budapest, 1996 Erben von Georg Lukacs 1996All rights reservedThe moral rights of the authors and translator have been assertedVersoUK: 6 Meard Street, London WI V 3HRUSA: 180 Varick Street, New York, NY 10014-4606Verso is the imprint of New Left BooksISBN 1-85984-747-1British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British LibraryLibrary of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataLukacs, Gyorgy 1885-1971.(Chvostismus und Dialektik. English]A defence of history and class consciousness: tailism and thedialectic/ Georg Lukacs; translated by Esther Leslie; with anintroduction by John Rees and a postface by Slavoj Zizek.p.em.ISBN 1-85984-747-1 (cloth)1. Socialism. 2. Proletariat. 3. Capitalism. 4. Communism.5. Class consciousness. 6. Dialectical materialism. 1. Tide.HX260.5.A6L78313 2000335.4'112-dc2100--028980Typeset by M RulesPrinted by Biddies Ltd, Guildford and King's Lynn
ContentsEditorial noteviiIntroductionby John Rees1Introduction to the Hungarian edition (1996)39by liisz/0 IllesTailism and the Dialecticby45Georg LukacsPostface:Georg Lukacs as the philosopher of Leninismby SlavqjZiiek151
Editorial noteThroughout the text, references to History and Class Consciousness(abbreviated as HCC) give page num:bers for the 1971 edition translatedby Rodney Livingstone.Elsewhere, where possible, references to works of Lenin and Marxand Engels refer to the English-language editions of theirCollected UtOrks(abbreviated respectively as CW and MECW and followed by thevolume and page numbers).
IntroductionJohn ReesThe document contained in this book has been a secret for more thanseventy years. Written in 1925 or 1926, it appears here in English for thefirst time. 1 Its existence was unknown, never referred to by GeorgLukacs in any of the numerous accounts and interviews that he gaveabout his life. But if the very existence of this book is surprising, its con tents are even more so. Here Georg Lukacs defends his masterpiece,History and Class Consciousness, from the attacks made on it after its pub lication in 1923. That an author should defend his work is not veryunusual. But Lukacs was not engaged in a commonplace literary debate.In the Communist movement of the mid-1920s the forces of Stalinismwere growing more powerful. To confront them might mean ·losing agreat deal more than one's reputation. Lukacs is always supposed not tohave done so. Much of the great critical industry that has subsequendygrown around Lukacs's work has assumed that the perspective of Historyand Class Consciousness lasted no longer than the following year, 1924, andthe publication of Lukacs's Lenin: A Study in the Uni of his Thought. Buthere we have the proof that Lukacs continued to defend History andClass Consciousness into the mid-1920s.The defence that Lukacs mounts here will also overturn somereceived opinion about the meaning of History and Class Consciousness. Ithas frequendy been assumed that Lukacs's critics were right when theyaccused History and Class Consciousness of being hostile to the idea thatMarx's method could be extended to account for developments in the
2ADEFENCE OFHISTORr AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESSnatural world. That myth is laid to rest in the passages that follow. It hasalso often been assumed that the issue of revolutionary organisationwas not an integral part of Lukacs's recovery of Marx's theory of alien ation. That too is a view that will now have to be abandoned. But beforewe look more closely at the theoretical issues raised by his work, weneed to look at Georg Lukacs and the path he travelled to revolutionarysocialism.Georg Lukacs's path to MarxisJDTo have met Georg Lukacs in the mid-1920s when he wrote his defenceof History and Class Consciousness would have been to meet a revolutionaryexile. Lukacs had fled to Vienna from his native Hungary after the fall ofthe Workers' Republic that lasted from March until August 1919. Hehad been a political commissar in the republic, at first for education andthen also with the Fifth Division of the Red Army. Mter the counter revolution he remained in Hungary to reorganise the Communist Party.Had the military regime of Admiral Horthy, which had taken powerwith the help of France, Britain and other Western powers, caught him,he would have been executed, as was his co-worker Otto Korvin. Whatmade the son of one of Budapest's wealthiest bankers become a revo lutionary willing to face exile and risk death?From his early teenage years Lukacs found himself driven betweentwo ideological poles. On the one hand he reacted against the semi feudal aristocratic environment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Headmired modern drama, Ibsen in particular. 'By the age of fifteen,'Lukacs recalled, 'I had arrived at what was for the time an extremelyavant garde Western position.' He was influenced by sociological andcultural theories in Germany, where he studied later in the pre-wardecade. Of his political aspirations at this time Lukacs says, 'I wanted tochange things . . . my ambition was to bring about changes in the oldHungarian feudal system. But there was no question of turning thesewishes into political activity because there was no movement along thoselines in Budapest at the time.'2On the other hand, Lukacs's hostility to the old order in Hungary did
INTRODUCTION3not transform him, as it did many other radicals and liberals from hisbackground, into an uncritical supporter of Germany or the Westerndemocracies. Despite the fact that he mosdy lived in Heidelberg from1912 until the end of the war, and that he originally went to Germanywith the intention of becoming a 'German literary historian', Lukacssoon came to 'the realisation that the history of German thought con tained a fair measure of conservatism'.3 In short, Lukacs says, 'For allmy condemnation of conditions in Hungary, this did not mean that Iwas prepared to accept English Parliamentarianism as an alternativeideal.'4This double rejection of the political alternatives offered by contem porary society was matched by a rejection of the intellectual alternativesavailable in pre-war Germany. The empirical sciences and positivistphilosophy were one, dominant, trend in Germany as the fruits of indus trialisation and imperial conquest shaped ideology. But these trendscollided with an older romantic and idealist consciousness that, while notprogressive in all its forms, was sceptical of the new utilitarian, scientis tic attitudes. Lukacs came into contact with some of the foremostrepresentatives of this ideological resistance to the dehumanising,materialistic drive of commodity capitalism, such as the neo-KantianHeidelberg philosophers Rickert and Windelband. What drew Lukacs tothese thinkers was their attempt to rescue some role for consciousnessand human action from under the wheels of the deterministic jugger naut of positivist science. As Rodney Livingstone has noted: 'It shouldbe noted that these neo-Kantian and parallel attempts to defend theautonomy of spirit avoided having recourse to explicidy metaphysical orreligious positions. Inevitably, therefore, the place of religion was oftentaken by art. Lukacs shared in this fashionable aestheticism for a time .it involved him in a search for authenticity amidst the sterility of modernlife.'5One possible source of a solution to the social and intellectual con tradictions of modern life, the workers' movement, seemed no solutionat all to Lukacs at this time. The German Social Democratic Party(SDP), the most powerful of the labour parties gathered in the SecondInternational, was a vast bureaucracy, a 'state within a state' whichseemed to reproduce exacdy those elements of modern society that
4ADEFENCE OFHISTORY AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESSLukacs opposed. In Karl Kautsky, the leading .theoretician of theSecond International, Lukacs simply saw another expression of the pos itivistic determinism that he rejected.But this rejection of the materialistic culture of modern life left Lukacscaught in a paradox. In a world characterised as a realm of 'absolute sin fulness', from where could progress come? From what point on the socialhorizon could there originate a force capable of leading beyond these twoinadequate alternatives? Lukacs had no answer to these questions. And,finding no social force or political strategy equal to the task, his mindturned to artistic and ethical responses. Perhaps brief moments of artis tic experience might overcome the alienation from modern politicalforms. Perhaps there might be an ethical stance that would allow one towithstand the degrading experience of living in a society where corrup tion was not simply excess but a fundamental principle of life. Lukacshimself described this attitude as 'romantic anti-capitalism'. It is from thispre-war period that two works of cultural criticism date, The Soul and itsForms (1911) and The Theory of the Novel (1916).The outbreak of the First World War only deepened this paradox.'The cultural elite into which he had assimilated showed that its con tempt for contemporary German life was perfecdy compatible with achauvinistic posture,' notes Rodney Livingstone; 'The ideology of "non political" thinkers and poets turned out to be conservative andnationalist in practice. '6 Lukacs's anti-capitalism inoculated him fromthis pro-war mood. But there was still no obvious home for him in thesocialist movement since the support that the SDP gave to the war wasa prime cause of despair. This is why the major socialist influences onLukacs up to this point were syndicalists such as Ervin Szabo who werebeyond the pale of Second International Marxism.Lukacs explains how his views evolved during the war:The German and Austrian armies may well defeat the Russians andthis will mean the overthrow of the Romanovs. That is perfectly in order.It is also possible that the German and Austrian forces will be defeatedby the British and the French and that will spell the downfall of theHapsburgs and the Hohenzollerns. That too is quite in order. But whowill defend us against the western democracies?7
INTRODUCTION5Thus the old dilemma was revisited, but with a new intensity. It was onlyresolved with the coming of the Russian Revolution. 'Only the RussianRevolution opened a window to the future; the fall of Czarism broughta glimpse of it, and with the collapse of capitalism it appeared in fullview . . . we saw - at last! at last! - a way for mankind to escape war andcapitalism. '8Returning to Hungary in 1918, Lukacs was one of the first tojoin thenewly formed Communist Party. far as Lukacs was concerned thechoice was made irrevocable towards the end of 1917,' writes IstvanMeszaros; 'In the turmoil of the unfolding revolutions he committedhimself for life not only to the Marxist perspective, but simultaneouslyalso to what'he considered to be its only feasible vehicle of realisation,the vanguard party. '9 Lukacs was by no means fully aware of the impli cations of Marx's theory, despite his early reading of Capital, Hegel and,during the war, Rosa Luxemburg's. writings. But in this he was by nomeans alone among the leaders of the new party. Very litde was knownof Lenin's writings even among those, such as party leader Bela Kun,who returned from Russian prisoner-of-war camps. Yet, within a matterof months, the new party and its inexperienced leaders found themselvesat the head of a workers' movement which took state power. In contrast,when the Bolsheviks led the Russian Revolution, they were veteranswho had been constructing a revolutionary organisation since at least1903. They had been shaped by the revolution of 1905, by the longyears of recovery that followed the defeat of that revolution, by thestruggle against the war. The Hungarian Communist Party had no suchpast to steel it, and this proved a decisive weakness in the dramaticcourse of the revolution.The Hungarian RevolutionThe year of the Hungarian Revolution, 1919, was the high point of thepost-war revolutionary wave that swept through Europe. Hungary'sAustrian neighbour was swept by revolutionary agitation and the short lived Bavarian Soviet republic arose in Germany during the lifetime ofthe Hungarian Revolution. At the same time, the French Black Sea fleet
6A DEFENCE OFHISTORY AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESSmutinied. The Hungarian Revolution itself opened with a strike wave inJanuary 1918. The wartime coalition government could not contain theunrest, despite the participation of the Hungarian SDP. A rail workers'general strike saw 150,000 on the streets of Budapest chanting 'Longlive the workers' councils!' and 'Greetings to Soviet Russia!'. Only theresignation of the SDP executive got the strikers back to work. But strik ers were soon back on the streets again. This phase of the movementculminated in a general strike that lasted from 22June to 27 June whenit was called off by the SDP. Nevertheless, the government buckledunder this pressure and, in October 1918, the war cabinet collapsed andwas replaced by an administration headed by the liberal Count Karolyibut which included SDP ministers.This Autumn Rose Revolution, as it became known, produced ahighly unstable situation. The Western victors of the First World Warforced Karolyi to cede half of Hungarian territory, intensifying wide spread shortages. In response, peasant uprisings and urban riots fusedwith industrial action. Workers' and soldiers' councils were formed andreal power increasingly rested in their hands, not those of the govern ment. 'The government,' records one historian, 'could not implement asingle major decision . . . without the tacit or expressed consent of thesocialists.' 10Yet these workers' councils were dominated by the SDP. Even inNovember 1918, the revolutionary left was still only a political clubinside the SDP. The Hungarian Communist Party (HCP) was notformed until the following month. Lukacs was an early member. TheHCP grew rapidly in early 1919, but its inexperience showed itselfalmost immediately. An attempted insurrection in February 1919 led torepression, the closure of the HCP headquarters and the arrest of BelaKun and many of its other leaders. Lukacs, as a member of the 'replace ment' leadership, became the effective editor of the party paper.On 18 March several thousand steel workers voted to fight to free theHCP prisoners and the printers' union voted for a two-day strike againstthe government. The soldiers' council and the Budapest militia cameunder HCP control. But the decisive blow was struck by the Westernpowers. Their representative in Budapest, Colonel Vyx, handed the gov ernment a note on 19 March which demanded that the whole country,·
INTRODUCTION7bar a 20-mile area around the capital, be put under military occupation.The government fell and handed power to an S DP administration.Hungary was once again at war, threatened by Romanian, Czech andFrench troops.The new S DP government could be effective only if it could masterworking-class insurgency - and this was possible only if the S D P couldmaster the HCP. On 21 March S DP leaders visited Bela Kun in jail andproposed a merger between their own party and the HCP. This was anentirely cynical manoeuvre on the part of the SDP who hoped thatmerging with the H C P would, in addition to taming the working class,bring Russian military assistance against the threat of Western occupa tion. As one' S D P leader told the workers' council:We must take a new direction to obtain from the East what has beendenied to us by the West . . . we shall announce to the whole world thatthe proletariat of this country has taken guidance of Hungary and at thesame time offered its fraternal alliance to the Soviet Russian govern ment.11Nevertheless, Kun agreed to join this 'revolutionary government' andtalked down opposition inside the HCP in a series of face-to-face meet ings. The HCP was very much the junior partner in the government,controlling only a minority of the government offices. Even their ownparty apparatus was swallowed up by the S D P. Lukacs fully supportedthis strategy.The new government, relying on a massive mobilisation by workers'organisations, was successful in its initial campaign to defeat the Westernarmies sent against it. But its policy was wildly ultra-left in all essentialmatters. The Hungarian CP committed a series of errors that were thealmost polar opposites of the choices made by the Bolsheviks in similarcircumstances. Where the Bolsheviks gave the land to the peasants, theHCP nationalised it. 'In practice the new managers were often theformer owners and little changed for the peasants and labourers whoworked on the estates. ' Understandably, as even official reports admitted,'many villages have revolted' and 'where they are unable to rise openlythe peasantry suffers our rule with grim fury'. 12 The Bolsheviks were
8A DEFENCE OFHISTORr AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESScautious in their policy of nationalisation, until the onset of civil warforced their hand; the HCP tried to nationalise everything, down to thelevel of small shops, personal savings and even jewellery. 13Even this catalogue of errors might not have been fatal had the insur rectionary mood in neighbouring Austria resulted in revolution or hadthe Red Army operations in the Ukraine sustained themselves for longenough to threaten Romania from the east. But the Communist leader ship in Vienna was every bit as inept as that in Budapest and themoment for an Austrian revolution passed away in what the BritishForeign Office rightly described as 'opera bouffe'.14 As the military sit uation turned in favour of the White armies in the Ukraine, the hope ofmilitary aid from Russia dwindled.Bela Kun, however, still had one final error to contribute to the fail ure of the revolution. Where the Bolsheviks maintained an absolutedistrust of the imperial powers, Bela Kun trusted the French president'sassurances that troops could be simultaneously withdrawn by both sides.This final misjudgement, and the ensuing second advance by pro Western troops, brought the fall of the workers' government and openedthe door to Admiral Horthy's counter-revolution. Kun knew exactlywho was to blame. In his final speech he said: 'No one will succeed ingoverning this country. The proletariat, which was discontented with ourrule . . . was shouting in the factories loudly and in spite of all propa ganda: "Down with the Dictatorship!". ' 15 Kun fled immediately toVienna while Lukacs remained in Hungary to try to reform the shat tered HCP underground. Mter two months in hiding, he too left forVienna.A Leninist in e:xileIt was only when Lukacs arrived in his Vienna exile that he had his firstreal chance to study Lenin's writings. He was reading them not onlyagainst the background of the still unfolding Russian Revolution but alsoagainst his own experience in the defeated Hungarian Workers'Republic. It was under the impact of these combined experiences thatLukacs finally settled accounts with his previous philosophical approach
INTRODUCTION9and completed his journey to revolutionary Marxism. But althoughLukacs's decision to join the HCP had been so sudden that he tookmany of his friends by surprise, his possession of a full understanding ofMarxism was necessarily a slower and more uneven process.Lukacs brought many intellectual ghosts from his past with him as hebecame a Marxist. In 'Bolshevism as a Moral Problem', written in thesa
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